Twenty Five Million Ghosts

by Steve Aitchsmith

  I felt a bit guilty because the lad was intimidated. I decided I needed to manage his discomfort in order to get the information out of him. I stood and invited him to sit. At the same time a tall athletic looking priest came in. He was English with a Northern accent. He introduced himself as Donald Pope.

  “Pretentious,” I chuckled and he smiled. I suppose he’s heard a million jokes about his name and I shouldn’t really add to that. The young priest took the opportunity to escape. Donald Pope told him he’d see him later and turned his attention back to me.

  “Dave told me about you. I spent his last hours with him. He gave me instructions about his family and left a message for you. He told me about your grandfather’s journal but didn’t know what was in it. He said that I should treat you like a relative.”

  “What happened?”

  “Heart. One attack that did most of the damage. He fought back,” I noticed that he smiled when I grinned at that. “He fought back and survived it but was weakened. Examination showed that no operation would save him and there was no available transplant organ. Besides, he said he wouldn’t accept a transplant organ and it should go to somebody younger if one came available. He was put to bed to await the inevitable. The doctors kept a crash cart by the bed but he sent it away. The second attack took him almost immediately when it occurred.”

  “He wouldn’t have liked to hang about. He was a great man.”

  “Yes, he was. We prayed together, obviously. I administered his last rites. He’ll be buried in Ireland. I can give you the details if you want to attend. Whatever it was you needed from him I will do for you. He said I was to help with anything you wanted.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but no. I trusted Dave because he was Dave, not because he wore a dog collar. Please apologise to the young priest for me, I think I might have frightened him. He just took me by surprise, that’s all. It was obvious to me that he had bad news for me and I just need that done, I don’t need to be gently led into it.”

  “I know,” he touched my arm. “Dave said you were birds of a feather.”

  “What was the message he left me?” I asked. He drew a small piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. There, in Dave’s handwriting was, ‘Fuck you. Never give in. Respect the ghosts.’

  I smiled. “Did you read this?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I didn’t understand it. I don’t need to, it’s between you and him. He told me not to bother trying to offer you spiritual guidance, he said you’d do that yourself.”

  I thanked the man and left.

  I had planned to get Dave’s advice on the way forward. Should I try to contact the Penns? Should I go to Ware? Should I go to the States to find relatives?

  I had little to go on. I had a photograph of Sarah Penn with Jack, taken just after the first war. They were so young. I googled a picture of an engraving of William Penn and imagined I could see some likeness. I found Cold Christmas on google maps but I couldn’t find the big country house. I racked my memory. I had visited the place when I was about five, there I met my great grandmother. All my memory holds from that time is the bus we used to get there, the tall green iron gates guarding the estate’s entrance, walking through woodland, a row of cottages and a big house my dad went into before we went to the cottages.

  I remember being told we were going to see mum’s gran but there was no other explanation. I remember the old lady, my great grandmother, and the small cottage with its narrow twisting staircase and nothing more. All I could find on maps was a big country hotel, with a golf course, that may or may not have been the house. I remember the old lady kissing my cheek when we left. She held my small hand for a long time.

  Ultimately, I decided not to pursue the Penn connection. Sarah had decided to throw in her lot with Jack, it was not for me to seek to undo that decision. The Penns will have to remain my lost family branch. Since I live in Sussex, William’s old stomping ground before Pennsylvania, I occasionally see places and signs indicating his work and life. It makes me smile. In a way, for him, I’m one of the ghosts that shouldn’t be here.

  That thought made me smile as well. There are a lot of people who now exist only because of this history, they are all valid people but wouldn’t be here without the wars that brought about some unlikely liaisons. Do they in some way counterbalance the lost millions? I am not a remnant of the future that did not occur, I am an alternative born from its destruction. ‘Sloppy,’ I imagined I heard the priest say.

  I spent the journey home thinking about William, Sarah, Jack, mum, dad, Dave, everyone I’ve ever known. It was probably the most introspective journey I’ve ever taken and that’s saying something.

  It was still quite sunny when I got home. It had been a while now and I decided to check the ant tin. I lifted it up and sure enough it was filled with larvae and panicking workers. I used a small blow torch to burn them all then replaced the tin to get some more. It only took one more tinning and the nest was so depleted it was reduced to ineffectiveness.

  My reasonably content existence continued on its course and occasionally I became aware of the ghosts. From time to time I’d think about the people I’ve personally lost. In the midst of life we are in death, blah blah blah. I left the journal for my daughter to read when she feels like it.

  I did go to Ireland for Dave’s funeral. I just hung about at the back, paid my respects and left. I returned later in the day and prayed over the grave, he would have liked that. As I left, I noticed a few middle aged men drinking and smoking outside the pub facing the graveyard. A couple of them raised their glasses to me and I waved as I walked away.

  The following summer I looked again at the ant’s nest to see if it still constituted a threat. It had changed. There appeared to be another, but not unrelated, species there. A slightly different size and colouring but also recognisable as last year’s ants, strange. I’m no entomologist and didn’t even try to explain this. The nest was busy and foraging lines were marching out in various directions but not towards the conservatory.

  Afterword

  In some ways this was an easy book to write; the stories were given to me by those I have known and loved, it is the history of my people. Yet, in other ways it was painfully difficult to write because it felt as if I were exploring the souls of those who lived it.

  This is fundamentally a work of fiction. Nonetheless, it is born from the stories that I was told and the people that I knew. It is therefore a work of fact-based fiction where I have given myself licence to fictionalise gaps in the stories. I’ve aged my dad a bit, just so that I could use him as the vehicle by which I might amalgamate and tell disjointed war stories, sorry dad. He’s every bit as tough as the character in the book.

  The parts of his story dealing with evacuation and POW repatriation were him. He really did enter Belsen but after the liberation. The rest is from other stories that he told me.

  Manny Cohen was real, the short story I tell about him was directly from my dad. I don’t know what became of him.

  Albert and Findlay are based on real people. The core of their stories was given to me by family. Albert’s ack-ack gun is as described to me by the person on whom he is based.

  He was old and I was young when he told me and something may have been lost in translation. I can find no other reference to the adapted gun. I have a photograph of the real person which was taken during the battle of Caen. In it he and his team have a standard lightweight artillery style ack-ack with them. Nonetheless, I’ve chosen to stay with the description the man gave me.

  Sade Morgenthau was real but had a different name.

  Aleksandra Ivanovna Barantceva is my own invention since the real individual in the life of the person on whom Findlay is based is unknown to me. Her characteristics are constructed from a couple of real Soviet heroes.

  Dietrich von Choltitz was a real fi
gure and, in my view, does deserve more recognition for his brave decision to declare Paris open and undefended. A reader might correctly infer that I also love Paris. I understand how this man could be seduced and improved by her.

  After the war he is reported by one source as saying: “We all share the guilt. We went along with everything, and we half-took the Nazis seriously instead of saying to hell with you and your stupid nonsense. I misled my soldiers into believing this rubbish. I feel utterly ashamed of myself. Perhaps we bear even more guilt than these uneducated animals.”

  Johann Waldheim is based on a man the real person behind Findlay wrote about in now lost letters to my dad. The Polish women and Findlay’s children are real but I know nothing else about them.

  Friedrich Jagemann is fictional but loosely based on an amalgam of real people, none of whom were noble characters.

  Nonetheless I here declare that this odious character has no relation to or bearing on any other person, living or dead, who may coincidentally have the same name. I used the name because it means ‘hunter’ and suits the predatory nature of the fictitious character.

  Jack and Sarah were real. I hope my take on their story does them justice.

  At some point in our lives we all come to the realisation that it’s never over. Even when we have drifted our slow uncomfortable way to our end it is apparent that we go on; in what we have done, our children, our work or those we have influenced. For good or ill we create the future.

  I didn’t understand that when I began this book. As I now reflect on it I see that it is true. From the elderly statesperson to the new born child, we all influence events and people in ways that live on. Our deaths are merely the point at which our active input is complete.

  Those who were affected by our existence, deal with the passing or mourn us are the meme by which our life extends into eternity. They remember us and our actions and pass it on to those who they in turn affect. Our influence survives long after our names are forgotten, our actions, our mere existence, last forever. It may be that idiosyncratic habits, which we all have, originated in some long forgotten ancestor and in that way they still are with us.

  The opening poem, which for the purposes of the story I ascribe to John ‘Jack’ Adams, is intended as both a tribute to the original work and a post script to it. I don’t think John McCrae would object. I’ve mainly kept his syllabic metre but did not copy his verse structure.

  Insofar that anyone may think it worthy of use, I here state that the poem, the copyright of which I retain, is placed on perpetual public licence for free use or performance by anybody, especially in remembrance ceremonies, except that this licence does not extend to commercial, profit making, political or non peaceful uses and excludes publishing or copying the poem except in an educational setting or as part of a scripted performance. The nature of public performance varies, so if you want to use it as part of a play or other presentation for which the audience pays… contact me first to see if we can agree the use is acceptable.

  This licence for use of the poem further contains two conditions: first that the source, this book, be acknowledged, and second, that if you are able you should make a small donation to the Royal British Legion, if within the UK, or to your national equivalent association if outside the UK.

  Please use it in your school, British legion or church with my blessing. If you use it to make money or promote nationalist hate, I will sue you.

  As a post war child the bombsites and derelict buildings of east London were my playground. It makes me chuckle to imagine what modern risk-averse authority would make of the games we played igniting unexploded incendiary bombs. ‘Firesticks’ we called them, when thrown at the correct angle they were effective and free fireworks. On one occasion a passing police officer chastised us for exploding one of them too close to the road. He sent us further into the bombsite to carry on, how times change.

  We often sire late in my family so each generation can be forty or more years separated from the next. Consequently, I only need step back one generation to be with relatives from both world wars. Some of them fought in both. All of them experienced the blitz.

  So it was that I spent my early life listening to the stories of the traumatised. I didn’t know any adult who was not in some way damaged by their experiences. My family had experiences from most spheres of the second war and some of the first. My teachers included veterans of Arnhem and Normandy as well as the Far East. My headmaster was partially blind because his eyes were damaged by a depth charge when he was a sub mariner.

  Today we label it PTSD and offer treatment. In the London of my childhood we just accepted the eccentricities, were not much bothered by the fist fights that sometimes broke out and, most importantly, just accepted that those who fought lost something more than their peace of mind; they lost something indefinable and nebulous that enables contentment.

  It is very sad that we have recently, yet again, seen people so damaged return to our land from distant wars.

  Therefore, this book is intended as a tribute to everybody who has been lost, failed to exist or damaged through war. This includes the soldiers, of all nations, the civilians and especially the innocent. I have no doubt that humanity will continue its talent for conflict. I have no doubt that more nutcases will occupy positions of power in the future just as they did in the past. I have no doubt that each new war will be considered justifiable and promoted by deluded politicians.

  It won’t carry much weight with these people but if I could say one thing to everybody involved in all of the current conflicts around the globe, it would be this: “Stop it, please. Just stop it.”

  The fictional character Dave Thompson started out with a standard Irish name. That probably made him a bit of a cliché but I was OK with it.

  My intention was to use the involvement of the feisty priest as a foil in order to progress what I wanted to say. The character’s intelligence, general street smarts and all round good-guyness were based on a friend of mine called Dave Thompson.

  Sadly, the real Dave died from a heart attack while I was writing the book. In tribute to him I renamed the character. Our relationship was not unlike that with the drinking, swearing, caring, fighting clergyman. Dave was an atheist and it amuses me to give his name to a priest. It would have amused him too.